Step 11: Increase Your Chance Of Success Using Business Analytics

It’s important to create content and build relationships with customers. But it doesn’t stop there. To learn what’s working and what to improve you need to measure what you’re doing. How? Well, by using business analytics of course!

Why Should I Use Business Analytics?

Business analytics help fine-tune your online marketing campaign. They allow you to track the progress of every aspect of your inbound marketing efforts. By looking at the results you can discover what’s working, what isn’t and how you can improve.

Get More By Measuring

To learn how successful your marketing efforts are, you measure your return on investment, or “ROI.” But this isn’t easy when you use traditional marketing – it’s difficult to measure how many people see your campaign, how many take action based on that campaign and how many actually become customers.

Let’s say you put up a poster at a bus station for a promotion about your yoga studio. How will you know if it works? And by that I mean, how will you measure the number of people who see your promotion? And who they are? And if they become customers. It’s difficult to know who saw your poster, who shared the story and who attended your yoga classes because of that poster.

Posters Cost Money – Are They Worth It?

Posters costs money. Even more money if they’re in a public space or on the side of a bus. But that’s okay if your campaign is effective. The real question is – how do you know?

To figure this out, count the number of people that need to attend your yoga class for you to break even, and how many people you need to make a profit. If the posters cost you $100, how many classes do you need to sell to get that $100 back? Now, how many do you need to sell to make it worth your time?

This is “Mad Men” advertising at it’s best – you’ve heard of the phrase “half of our marketing budget is wasted, we just don’t know which half.” This is what people are talking about.

Go Online To Measure Your Efforts

The great thing about marketing online is that you can measure the results because you can track almost every way someone interacts with you. There are great programs that allow you to measure business analytics for free – we recommend using Google Analytics as a starting point. It can measure a lot of things, like how many people are visiting your site, how many pages they go to and how long they spend on them.

If you want to track and measure social media business analytics, try using Hootsuite. It’s free and will help you monitor your social conversations. However, it can be complex, so start with Google Analytics and go from there.

Set Goals

The information you get from analytics is cool. But if you don’t set goals and decide where you want to go, how will you know if your campaign’s working?

Guess what we’re going to suggest? Yup, you got it – set goals that you can measure so you can adapt what you’re doing to get the results you want. If you’re making steady progress but aren’t hitting your targets, feel free to re-evaluate what you are doing and where you can improve. However, don’t jump the gun. It takes time to hit your goals, so keep on trucking. Everything is progress.

5 Steps To Set Effective Online Marketing Goals

1) Decide How It All Fits

Each part of your online marketing campaign is trying to accomplish something as part of your overall strategy on how to get clients online. For example, your blog is used to establish yourself as an expert on a subject and help more people find you online, while your email campaigns are used to build relationships with people and earn their business over time. Make sure you know what you want each part can do, and set goals accordingly.

2) Break It Down

If you were training to run a marathon, you wouldn’t start by running 42 kilometers, so break down your goals into small steps. Take it week by week and month by month to build a plan you can follow. Every step you take will be focused on helping you achieve your end goal.

TIP: Remember your ROI when you set your goals. If you know a campaign will be time consuming or you have to pay someone to do it, ask yourself – how many people will I need to reach, and how many of them will need to become customers to make this effort a success?

3) What’s Hot? What’s Not?

Look at the parts of your online marketing campaign that are meeting your goals. Are there blog posts that stand out? An email that received a lot of attention? A tweet that went viral? Any keywords that you’re ranking high for (aka people type those words into Google and find you)?

Learning what isn’t working can be just as helpful as examining what you’re doing right. Are there keywords that you can’t rank for? Blog posts that no one’s reading? You may notice an underlying factor that you can identify and adjust.

4) Apply The Results

Now you know what’s working and what isn’t, use this knowledge to improve your online marketing campaign. So, if there’s a certain type of content that’s appealing to your consumer, focus on that. On the other hand, if you’re generating more leads (people who are interested in you) on Facebook but not having any luck with Pinterest, it may be a good idea to put that energy into Facebook. You have limited time, so focus on what works.

5) Re-Evaluate & Keep Going

Goals aren’t written in stone. If results are improving but you aren’t reaching your targets, and you can’t put more energy into reaching them, re-adjust that specific goal. On the other hand, if you meet your 6 month goals in the first month, congratulations, now raise your expectations to push what you’re capable of achieving.

Wow, this has been a big learning journey.You’re almost there – the last phase is to summarize what we’ve learned about marketing yourself online so you can start attracting more customers!